Connecting Cheshire

Connecting Cheshire is a council-led partnership of 4 local authorities covering Cheshire, Halton and Warrington bringing additional fibre-optic broadband coverage to areas previously outside the commercially and private funded fibre roll-out. We have secured funding from local and central government, the European Union and our infrastructure partner BT to reach over 90,000 premises mainly in our outlying and rural areas by 2017.

The aim of the project is to achieve the best ‘future-proof’ broadband coverage for Cheshire. We're delivering our roll-out, working closely with our partners and participating organisations, taking into account many factors including local demographics and geography, planning requirements, the existing engineering infrastructure and the availability of suitable technologies to provide a service.

Unfortunately cost is also a significant factor; we need to balance our investment to reach the most premises against the costs of connecting more dispersed communities further away from the existing infrastructure. We also evaluate the potential speeds we can provide against the cost to ensure more premises can benefit from an increase in speed as possible.